News of the week

Morgan Stanley Will Offer Bitcoin Trade Swaps

$83 billion US banking giant Morgan Stanley is preparing infrastructure for complex derivatives tied to Bitcoin, according to Alastair Marsh at Bloomberg. Currently, the bank is said to be undergoing an internal approval process.

BitGo Inc., a startup in the field of crypto security, received approval from South Dakota State’s Division of Banking for its branch BitGo Trust Company to legally operate within the state. In the new press release, Mike Belshe, BitGo’s CEO, spoke about the importance of approving a custody service of the company, which process 15% of all global bitcoin transactions, and $15 billion per month across all cryptocurrencies.

Russian state-owned corporation is working with the Waves platform to develop a blockchain system to manage data on its holdings, which include Autovaz and Kamaz and the firearms manufacturer Kalashnikov. The project will pave the way for the application of blockchain technology to Rostec’s operations.

In a court case that has been brought by a number of exchanges, The Reserve Bank of India argued that Bitcoin cannot be recognized in the country as currency under the extant laws. In a statement before the nation’s Supreme Court RBI added, that cryptos are peer-to-peer networks, not controlled by a service provider and “can’t even be considered as a valid payment system.”

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Plunge 80% is a Familiar Event for the Internet

The value of Bitcoin has dived by 80% since January with a loss of $640 billion, which has reminded some of the Dot-Com bubble in 2000. A large number of online-based companies was founded from near the turn of the new millennium, but the only the luckiest were able to recover during the bubble. The decline of ICOs is now steeper than the Nasdaq Composite Index’s 78 percent peak-to-trough monitoring after the Dot-Com bubble burst.

Russia’s initial coin offering pilot has ended. According to Ivan Semagin, Bank of Russia’s deputy director of financial markets development, everything went well, but there are still a number of legal issues that need to be addressed before Russia can offer a state-backed cryptocurrency.